2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 301307

COLLOQUIUM

Another way to compose

the common worldBruno Latour, Sciences Po

The Inquiry into Modes of Existence is an attempt to build on the work of severalanthropologists who have tried to go, as Philippe Descola said, Beyond Nature andCulture. Since this movement is itself one of the consequences of a reappraisal of thefunction of science, a new space has been opened up for an anthropology of modernity byusing several yardsticks to define the reality of the beings informants say they encounter.It is those connections between science studies, anthropology, and modernity that will befollowed in this colloquium.Keywords: Moderns, bifurcation of nature, collectives, interagentivity, practice, universality,multiplicity

If it is notably difficult to do the anthropology of those who invented the anthropology of others, it is in part because they have managed to avoid doing their own.1This most primitive and most aboriginal lack of reflexivity makes any sort of selfexamination a skewed enterprise. This is why it is fairly useless to try to distinguishphilosophy from anthropology when one wishes to find ones way through such anentangled jungle. You need anthropologyassociated whenever possible with itsset of ethnographic methodsto overturn philosophys claims that it has alreadyreached universality; and you need philosophywith its own set of interpretiveA previous draft of this paper was originally delivered as an opening statement as part ofThe ontological turn in French philosophical anthropology, an executive session of theAAA Annual Meeting, Chicago, November 23, 2013. This work has benefited from theERC grant An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 2010 N269567.1. Editors note (John D. Kelly): this is a revised version of the text earlier posted on BrunoLatours website. his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Bruno Latour.TISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.016

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skillsto make sure that anthropologys claims to scientific status are not a formof provisional and provincial metaphysics. Each discipline spurs the other to restart its inquiries into the collectives that are constantly enmeshed by conquest,commerce, or war. Being forced to start again makes certain that any decision oncommonality or difference is not arrived at too quickly. Both disciplines might stillhave as their goal to reach for the common worldin the singular. But their constant game of cats cradle slows them enough so that no shortcuts are taken towardtheir joint work of composition. Overall, their connection ensures a combinationof pluralism and a plausible future unity in a very different way from the oldestsettlement of one nature and many cultures which stabilized universality too fastand accepted plurality too lightly.This mutual stimulation between philosophy and anthropology has been especially important in my own field of science studies, since the philosophy ofscience has determined a large part of our mental organizationincluding, ofcourse, the very project that created an uneasy relation between biological andcultural anthropology. The strategic and unexpected importance of the philosophy of science comes from the fact that it has become the main knot for the settlement of legitimate ontologies: that is, for what should be expected from agencies.So if there is one topic where the two disciplines cannot be dissociated, it is thatof settling how many ontological templates one should be ready to consider inorder to grasp the relations between agenciesor interagency, to use Descolasterm. This is why the link between philosophy and anthropology should not bedefined by some ontological turn: ontology has been there all along and hasbeen essential to the modernist project. As to there being a French turn, this isan excess of honor for such a provincialized academic community... Anyway,as far as I know, Viveiros de Castro is no more French than Isabelle Stengers orDavid Abram.Thanks in large part to this collaboration of philosophy and anthropology inscience studies, we are beginning to have a plausible viewor a possible narrativefor the invention of the two templates with which the Moderns have attempted to account for their meeting with the others: namely, the joined-at-the-hiptwins known as subjectobject.2 The entrenchment by the philosophy of scienceof the impossible subjectobject linkage is the long-term consequence of what had2. Editors note (John D. Kelly): Bruno Latours opening statement is condensed on keypoints in order to be comprehensive, engaged with his anthropological audience, andbrief. Rather than revise away from what was actually said, with Latours permission Iadd a few explanatory notes on key concepts and topics. Here, an interested reader without particular familiarity with Latours work may want to know that he has launched anintense, extensive ethnography of the Moderns in his AIME (An Inquiry into Modesof Existence) project (http://www.modesofexistence.org). These Moderns are the actants attempting to deal with all others first via the division into subjects and objects,as Latour discusses here. The first extensive discussion of actants and their encounters with others, as a general starting point less problematic than division of the worldbetween subjects and objects, is Latours Irreductions ([1984] 1988), points 1.1.7 to1.1.9 (15960). The general project of reassessment of the truths and situations of theseModerns is launched in We have never been modern ([1991] 1993) and continues withthe AIME project itself.

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been at first a rather simple practical concern. To do their job, physicists had toparenthesize a set of qualities they did not have to take into account so as to be ableto underline the very tiny few they could calculate more easily. The problem is thatwhat had been, for instance in Galileos hands, a matter of convenience becamelater, in the hands of philosophers such as Locke (mainly for political reasons), anontological distinction between what came to be known as primary quantitiesreal, invisible, emptied of valuesand secondary qualitiesfull of values, accessible to the senses but unfortunately devoid of any reality. Such a bifurcation ofnature, to use Whiteheads (1920) qualification, created for the Moderns a verypuzzling and uncomfortable situation, since they now had to choose between aconjectureprimary objective qualitiesand a dreamthe secondary qualities (to quote from The concept of nature).3The result of this bifurcation has been the creation of an idealistic definition ofmatter where all the agencies encountered in daily life had to answer only the following question: Are you objective, that is, material, that is real; or, are you subjective, that is probably meaningful but unreal? And the belated consequence of sucha question has been to situate objects as a point in space without real space and asa moment in time without real time.Its one thing that such a conception of materiality was not prepared to meetthe other collectives encountered by colonizers, predicators, and soon ethnographers (the whole of anthropological literature is one long complaint and objection against the unusable vision offered by such an idealistic materialism). But thegreat irony (the one I have never stopped pointing to) is that it was also the surestway to continue to lose sight of what the Moderns themselves were doing: namely,multiplying interagentivity through science, technology, and economics. And it isfair to say that the protestations of philosophers in the Western tradition were never as efficacious as those of anthropologists because the latter saw first hand thatthey could not progress within the dead alley of subject and object to account fortheir fieldwork, whereas the former tried endless combinations to save the false dichotomy, for instance through dialectic or phenomenology. This was because what

3. Editors note (John D. Kelly): Latour has recently discussed Whitehead and this bifurcation extensively, including the following depiction of it: Bifurcation is what happenswhenever we think the world is divided into two sets of things: one which is composedof the fundamental constituents of the universeinvisible to the eyes, known to science,real and yet valuelessand the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add tothe basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them (2005: 22526).Thus objects and subjects, primacy to the former but meaning, value, intelligibility, tothe latter, are not, according to Whitehead, a good way to start a universe. Whiteheadsmost extensive discussion of this bifurcation is his Theories of the bifurcation of Nature, in The concept of nature (1920: 2648). Latour is quite interested, also, in IsabelleStengers discussion of Whitehead, as he makes clear here. See also her book Thinkingwith Whitehead ([2004] 2011) and Latours review of the original French edition of thisbook (2005). (This review can also be found on Latours website, at http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/93-STENGERS-GB.pdf.)

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anthropologists of the far away could do (i.e. bracketing-out ontology) was not anoption for philosophers of the close at hand.4This is where an ethnography of the Modern is indispensable in taking upthe mantle for what would otherwise remain a philosophical argument. It is onlythrough attentive fieldwork that you can measure how ill equipped you are with thepincer of subject and object, to give one striking example, to account for a technicalproject a form of agentivity totally ignored by philosophy of technology. The reason that fieldwork is indispensable is that, viewed from afar, the claims of engineersto stick to material objects might seem superficially accurate. Distance, here asalways, is a fertile source for exoticism.This exoticism has been especially difficult to overcome in the case of scientificpractice, to give another equally striking example. Even though any practicing scientist has to multiply templates to get access to a bewildering variety of agencies,the official philosophy of science tries to corral all those strange inventions intothe Procrustean bed of subject and object. And in this case there is the additionalirony that such an enclosing makes it impossible to give Science (the highest valueof those collectives) a safe grounding. That is, it measures any discussion along themost selfcontradictory of gradients: either a fact is real and not made (i.e. unknownas well as unmanageable) or it is made but, then, is simply subjective (and unrealor artificial). Hence the automatic association of description of scientific practicewith relativism.It is pretty terrible to live as a collective between conjecture and dream. Itwas even more dispiriting for the elites of those collectives to live between inaccessible realities and accessible unrealitieswhile at the same time transformingthe world like no other collective had done before them. It took a long time foranthropologists of the other collectives to accept that a large part of their difficulties in making sense of their data had to do with the exoticism that had renderedthe Moderns so unfit for reflexivity. They had to find a solution other than thebracketing-out of ontology. In the case of the Moderns, exoticism (this may be oneof their defining traits) is the projection not that distant foreigners have of them,but of the distance they insist on maintaining to themselves, and by consequenceto others! This is a distance that could explain, as I have often argued, the linkbetween creativity and moving blindly forward.(It is actually this gap between practice and philosophy which allows Descola toqualify as naturalists those who use the subjectobject even though, in their daily4. Editors note (John D. Kelly): This bracketing-out of ontology is the signature moveof Edmund Husserls early-twentieth-century phenomenology, a philosophical attempt to sustain and elaborate on Kantian foundations by ignoring objective realitiesand focusing attention on the experiences of the subject, to better understand, well,everything. Thus, to restate the points here, both dialectical and phenomenological philosophies proliferate new entities and multiply interagentivity, while trying and failingeach in their own way to sustain and stabilize the difference between subjects and objects. The anthropologists in the field could, and in fact had to, actually bracket-out notthe object but the subjectobject dichotomy, if and when they understood what theyframed as distant realities. This strategy wont work for the close at hand, especially theoutcomes of interagentive technical projects.

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experience, they let agency proliferate. Alternatively, and this is a question not settled, it is such a gap that might have helped them to expand analogism to anotherextraordinary degree. The key phenomenon here is their use of visual and descriptive devicesthe new important topic developed by Descola in his latest work.)If there is one case where the constant interference between philosophy and anthropology is necessary, it is in exploring this gap between selfdescription and whatwe keep calling practice, even though the word designates nothing more than therefuse heap of everything that the subjectobject pincer has been unable to grasp.If everything of late has become practice, it is not because it is a good concept; itis simply that the subjectobject inherited from the bifurcation is a terrible one. Ifwe were allowed to use different ontological templates, we would have no need forpractice, since every form of existence would be explicated in its own languageand according to its own condition. So there exists a direct link between the lack ofreflexivity I mentioned at the beginningthe deep fog of exoticism in which theModerns are happy to hideand the proliferation of practice-based inquiries.There is the additional difficulty that people who cannot account for themselves, who are not even able to defend their most cherished values such as scienceor technology, might turn out to be dangerous. After all, at the time of ecologicalmutations, it is important to find a medical definition for the word hubris, oftenused only in too-mythological a sense.Hence the importance of casting aside the NatureCulture predicament, thislate descendant of the division into primary/secondary qualities. This is the goalnot only of Descolas work, but also, to take a recent, quite remarkable example, ofEduardo Kohns (2013) How forests think: An anthropology beyond the human (eventhough the use of the word beyond is regrettable in both their titles). But theyare not alone. Haraways (2003) interspecies inquiry is another powerful exampleof interagentivity, and so is the object-oriented ontology of some philosophers.They are all aware that once a blind alley has been recognized, it makes no sense totry to continue along the same path, since they all have to show, in their differentmanners, that the exploration of interagentivity does not lead beyond but ratheraway, underneath, elsewhere, and definitely without.What An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME) may add to this multiplicityof paths is a more systematic way of accounting for the various ontological templates used, not by the Moderns, but by those who have never been modern. Thebaseline for comparative anthropology does not need to remain the official version,as if the Moderns were employing for good the subjectobject pincer for all the beings with which they trade. With such a default position it is very difficult to avoidframing the results of ones fieldwork either in opposition to such a baseline or bythe older, weaker strategy of bracketing-out all ontological claims to existence. Thefirst strategy ends up conforming to the exoticism of Nature, while the second cannot extirpate itself from the notion of multiple cultures, worldviews, or even socialconstructions of reality.The goal of the AIME project is to open a middle ground (White 1991) wherewhat I call diplomatic negotiations may be started again without those attemptsbeing nullified in advance by the two hypotheses of universality and multiplicity. To take an example inspired by Kohns book (since, anyhow, soil and forestscientists do not treat their subject matter in the idealized way of Westernized2014 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 301307

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science), it is of extreme interest to negotiate how forests think with the otherforest inhabitantsa crucial question for any forest management in the future. Interagentivity, that is, the capacity of relating agencies with one another withoutpassing every time through the obligatory passage point of the subjectobject(if such diplomatic encounters were taking place), would begin to draw lines ofagreement and dissent totally different from what would have been expected froma Nature-versus-Culture frame.The multiplication of such diplomatic scenes will become even more importantwhen the acceleration of ecological mutations forces the inhabitants of the shrinking domains of life into finding out how to compose the common world that theyare supposed to inhabit, if not peacefully, at least without exterminating one another. In that sense, the ontological turn is neither the fancy of a philosophical schoolof thought nor a tool for a better ethnography. It is one of the ways to take up, onceagain, the mantle of that politicsor rather of that cosmopoliticsthat anthropologists at the dawn of their discipline had begun to weave together by refusing tolet physical and cultural anthropology split apart. That their reuniting does not inany way resemble the older dream of naturalization does not speak to the weaknessof the discipline. Rather, it exemplifies the incredible energy with which anthropologists of various descriptions had tackled the terrifying issues of the last century andin which they tackle today the challenge of what Peter Sloterdijk (2013) has calledmonogeism: that is, the discovery that there is one Earth, the unity and habitabilityof which remains exactly as puzzling as at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

ReferencesHaraway, Donna. 2003. The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How forests think: An anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley: University of California Press.Latour, Bruno. [1984] 1988. Irreductions. In The pasteurization of France, 151236. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.. [1991] 1993. We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UniversityPress.. 2005. What is given in experience? A review of Isabelle Stengers Penser avec Whitehead. Boundary 2 32(1): 22237.Sloterdijk, Peter. 2013. In the world interior of capital: Towards a philosophical theory of globalization. Cambridge: Polity.Stengers, Isabelle. [2004] 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.White, Richard. 1991. The middle ground: Indians, empires and republics in the Great LakesRegions 16501815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Whitehead, Alfred North. 1920. Theories of the bifurcation of Nature. In The concept ofnature, 2648. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.